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GOD If grace was necessary for salvation, was it also suYcient? If you are oVered grace, can you resist it? If so, then there would be some scope for freedom in human destiny While some would end up in hell because they had never been oVered grace, hell would also contain those who had been oVered grace and turned it down In the course of controversy Augustine’s position continually hardened, and in the end he denied even this vestige of human choice: grace cannot be declined, cannot be overcome There are only two classes of people: those who have been given grace and those who have not, the predestined and the reprobate We can give no reason why any individual falls in one class rather than another If we take two babies, equally in the bonds of original sin, and ask why one is taken and the other left; if we take two sinful adults, and ask why one is called and the other not; in each case the judgements of God are inscrutable If we take two holy men, and ask why the gift of perseverance to the end is given to one and not to the other, the judgements of God are even more inscrutable (DDP 66) The crabbed crusader of predestination in the monastery at Hippo is very diVerent from the youthful defender of human freedom in the gardens of Cassiciacum It was the former, and not the latter, whose inXuence was powerful after his death and cast a shadow over centuries to come Boethius on Divine Foreknowledge The problem that faced Augustine in reconciling human freedom with the power of God can be solved if one is willing to jettison the doctrine of predestination But for all those who believe that God is omniscient there remains a problem about divine foreknowledge: this concerns not God’s willing humans to act virtuously and be saved, but simply God’s knowing what humans will or will not This problem was discussed in a clear and energetic fashion in the Wfth book of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy The book addresses the question: in a world governed by divine providence, can there be any such thing as luck or chance? Lady Philosophy says that if by chance we mean an event produced by random motion without any chain of causes, then there is no such thing as chance The only kind of chance is that deWned by Aristotle as the unexpected eVect of coinciding causes (DCP 1) In that case, Boethius asks, does the causal network leave 283
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